[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Giulio Prisco]

An alien artifact the size of a dust speck, crewed by 42,000 alien
uploads implemented in nano-circuitry, landed on my nose five minutes
ago. It is now writing a virus to replace junk DNA with a message.

A few seconds ago, a wormhole opened in my freezer between the meat
and the cottage cheese. It is now shooting photons at the eggs, and
you wouldn't believe the message encoded in the polarization. It is
really wow.

No? Perhaps yes. Let's keep looking, and widen the search.

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 11:18 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> On 2013-08-27 15:32, spike wrote:
>>
>> Of all the observed scientific anomalies that I know of, the misnamed
>> Fermi paradox is absolutely the most vexing. The more we study that
>> question, the more clear it is that there is something fundamentally wrong
>> with our models of everything we think we know about intelligence,
>> evolution, space travel, everything.
>
>
> Yes. You can guess why it is a favourite around the FHI office. It annoys us
> too.
>
>
>>   This view of the evolution of intelligence as a temporary random
>> excursion from the boring mean, a spike rather than an S curve to a new and
>> higher plateau, goes against everything I have always believed and hoped
>> for, but it is the only way I have been able to explain Fermi's paradox.
>> This realization is in some ways worse than when my own fundamentalist
>> religious notions crumbled to dust beneath my feet. I do hope someone can
>> talk me out of this grim conclusion.
>
>
> Well, we might be lucky and life is amazingly unlikely. A more worrying
> possibility is strong convergence: all civs somehow become quiet and do not
> litter the universe; as I have argued this is deeply problematic - why are
> there no defectors? The possibility of the earliest big expanders just
> setting up some rules implementing this, with police nanoprobes in every
> system, is downright paranoid but seems much more consistent - and might
> actually be pretty benign, if a tad too close to a religious view (God as a
> script set by ancient aliens running on a distributed police replicator
> system...) The simulation argument might be the really nice one: we are
> living inside the posthumans' simulation, and they just left out aliens.
>
> When being simulated or subject to alien police devices are the nice
> options, then things are weird.
>
>
>
> --
> Dr Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>
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